Grade to a named stock
Every film stock has a signature: which channel it holds back, where its contrast sits, how it handles skin, how coarse the grain is, what happens at a blown highlight. A profile here sets seven of those properties at once, and the trims below adjust the result without leaving the stock.
Seventeen stocks are included, thirteen colour and four black and white, grouped in the picker by manufacturer.
What a profile changes
Each channel gets its own gamma and gain, because a colour negative is three separately sensitised layers rather than one image with a tint over it. That is why Portra keeps skin warm while its shadows stay neutral, and why Superia pushes green in the midtones without turning the whole frame green.
On top of that the profile sets a contrast curve and its pivot, a base fog level that lifts the blacks the way film base does, an overall saturation, a grain amount, and a halation strength.
Choosing between the colour stocks
| Stock | Character |
|---|---|
| Portra 160 | The finest grain of the three Portras, slightly more contrast, neutral shadows. |
| Portra 400 | Low contrast, warm skin, forgiving. Portraits. |
| Portra 800 | Warmer and grainier than 400, with more contrast. Low light. |
| Gold 200 | Warm and yellow-leaning, moderate contrast. Daylight snapshots. |
| Ektar 100 | High saturation, fine grain, cool shadows. Landscape and product. |
| Kodachrome 64 | Strong contrast, restrained reds, dense blacks. |
| Velvia 50 | The most saturated of the set, heavy contrast. Landscape. |
| Superia 400 | Green-leaning midtones, visible grain. Consumer colour negative. |
| Superia 1600 | The same crossover pushed hard, with the coarsest colour grain here. |
| Pro 400H | Pastel and green-leaning, low contrast, holds highlights. High-key portraits. |
| CineStill 50D | Daylight balance, fine grain, clean colour, moderate halation. |
| CineStill 800T | Tungsten balance, so daylight goes cool and blue. Heavy red halation. |
| Vista 200 | Magenta-leaning and punchy, which is what separates it from Gold. |
The three Portras form a ladder rather than three different looks: grain runs 9, 16, 28, and the cast warms at each step. Pick by how much texture the photo should carry.
Four stocks drop saturation to zero. Tri-X 400 carries the most contrast and coarse grain, Acros 100 is the opposite with fine grain and deep blacks, HP5 Plus sits flat and mid-grained, and Delta 3200 has lifted blacks and grain at 52, the heaviest in the set.
Halation
Bright areas above about 72% luminance are isolated, blurred at a radius of roughly 1.2% of the shorter side, and added back weighted toward red. Green gets about a third as much and blue about an eighth.
Most stocks have an anti-halation backing that absorbs the scattered light, so their profiles set this low. Both CineStill stocks have had that backing removed, which is what the conversion from motion picture film amounts to. 800T sits at 90 against Portra 400’s 26; 50D is slower and finer, so it blooms less at 34.
Set the slider above 100% to exaggerate it, or to 0 to remove it while keeping the rest of the profile.
Example: a daylight portrait
Load the photo, pick Portra 400, and leave everything at default. If the result is flatter than you want, add 10% contrast trim rather than switching stock, because the contrast is most of what separates Portra from Ektar.
For the same photo on CineStill 800T, expect a blue cast: the stock is balanced for tungsten light at 3200K and a daylight scene has far more blue than it expects. That is correct behaviour, not an error. Warm it with a positive exposure trim, or use a different stock.
Order of operations
Exposure runs first, then the per-channel gamma and gain, then contrast around the profile’s pivot, then base fog, then saturation. Halation is computed from the graded image, so a stock that raises contrast blooms more than one that does not. Grain goes on last, and Profile strength blends the whole result back toward the original at the end.
Grain and halation radii are percentages of the frame, so the full-resolution download carries the same grain size and bloom spread the preview showed.